There is an increasing demand for optical networks and optical communication between nodes of such networks, because the increased global demand for high speed data exchange. Such optical communication systems need a beacon optical signal to be present to provide bi-directional line-of-sight control and accurately point to the optical receiver. A conventional optical beacon signal/beam emits a constant amount of energy over time. If the beacon beam is aligned, as desired, the same amount of energy is received at the receiving end of the beacon beam. Accordingly, these conventional optical beacon beams are not capable of carrying information, such as signal switching/routing information.
A prior attempt to build a high bandwidth space network was the Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT), which would have included 5 GEO satellites, with both RF and laser links, in an Internet Protocol (IP) environment. It was going to use packet switching protocol, so each packet would have contained information about the destination. However, the project was cancelled and never built. Other previous projects to build high bandwidth space communication networks planned to use dedicated static links, with reconfiguration as necessary.
However, unlike terrestrial high bandwidth communication networks, a transparent free space optical communication system does not convert from optical to electrical signals on board the spacecraft. Avoiding Optical-Electrical-Optical (O-E-O) conversion of the high bandwidth data is highly desirable, since it minimizes the complexity, size, weight, and power of the system. The optical signal is simply amplified and then switched to the appropriate path to be transmitted to the next node. The routing and scheduling information has been generated by the Network Operations Center (NOC). Because the high bandwidth signal is never converted to electrical, it is not feasible to extract header information from each data packet. The present invention describes an alternate way of distributing switching information (and other data).